This is part of a series of short blogs on different organic search ranking techniques we use to increase our clients’ website visibility. Hopefully it would help you with optimizing your website. As always, if you have questions or would like us to assist you with improving and maintaining your organic search rankings, contact us!
Before you optimize your website, you need to have an idea of what to optimize the website for. Many inexperienced people (including some experienced marketing ones) choose keywords based on the obvious. Meaning the keywords chosen are what you want to sell, or what you want to be found with.
If you are just doing this – stop!
Obviously choosing keywords that relates to your product or services are what you want to optimize for. However, you also need to consider other factors like how competitive the keywords are, or if the keywords are too broad and are bringing up irrelevant search results. It would serve you to find out if the keywords are the ones that your potential clients are using to find you.
The crux of keyword research and selecting the right keywords for your website is based on all those factors. Search volume must be weighed carefully against the competitiveness of your keywords – the number of sites already ranking for those terms. The balance between high volume and low competition is the ideal selection. You also might want to focus on long-tail keywords since they are easier to win, and probably more effective for your intended audience. Many times, our selection criteria includes how easy it is to type (or easily auto-corrected) on a mobile keyboard since 58% of search occurs on mobile (Source: Hitwise).
There are many selection criteria we use to finding the best keywords to optimize on our clients’ websites. Just remember that the obvious is usually not the best.